


Pancake Acquisition Specialist

by AnAuthorGoingByMeadow



Category: Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson, Persona 5, Persona Series, Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Book 04: Rhythm of War Spoilers, Gen, Lift is pre-Words of Radiance, No Persona 5: The Royal Spoilers, Post-Kamoshida for the Phantom Thieves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:55:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28068126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnAuthorGoingByMeadow/pseuds/AnAuthorGoingByMeadow
Summary: "We go into the hearts of criminals and steal-""I'm in," interrupted Lift. "You had me at 'steal'."When a girl from a fantastical world with strange powers mysteriously appears in Tokyo and begins her new life by attempting to rob the Wilton Hotel cake buffet of its entire pancake supply, the Phantom Thieves pointedly did not recruit her to their vigilante group on purpose. It just sort of happened on its own.Featuring exciting content such as 'Personas as an Invested Art', 'mathematical proof of Lift's actual age', and 'a counter at the bottom of each chapter keeping track of exactly how many pancakes have been stolen over the course of the story'.Not actually complete, I just can't find the button to fix it.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 15





	Pancake Acquisition Specialist

“The most horrifying realization I’ve ever had was that your thoughts go on to the Cognitive Realm and possibly contribute to new spren,” Wyndle complained, curling and uncurling a vine nervously. “Every time you come up with a scheme like whatever _that_ was, some poor spren might be developing under the influence of your mind. It'll be the decline of social order.”

“My thinking ain’t the worst sort of thinking,” Lift said. “You say it was a bad plan, and Voidbringers are full of lies, so that means it was a good one.”

“I’m a cultivationspren! Not a Voidbringer,” Wyndle said, rustling his leaves. “And you got us _banished to another world_!”

Lift shrugged. “Could be worse.”

“ _How?_ ”

Lift eyed the tower in front of them. It looked fancy. Glass windows on all four sides? Talk about ritzy. “Could’ve been banished somewhere with nothing to do.”

“How will we ever get back to Roshar?” Wyndle said, shaking his head and muttering to himself. “We’ll need to get to a perpendicularity and–“

“Quiet,” Lift said. “Through the window there. They got a big banquet room in that tower. Full of richfolks with fancy suits eating and eating. There ain't an end to it by the looks of things.”

“Don’t tell me…”

Lift smiled. “It’s lunch time.”

* * *

“Then it’s settled,” Morgana said. “We’ll start looking for our next target immediately.”

The others around the table nodded. If they hadn’t gorged themselves on the buffet, Akira was sure that they – or rather, Ryuji – would be cheering and calling for a toast. The Phantom Thieves of Hearts would be continuing their work, and that was something worth celebrating.

The moment of levity was interrupted by a crashing noise from the buffet’s kitchen. Akira looked over at the staff door, where a girl with dark skin and messy black hair power-slid out of the kitchen and into a serving table of pasta. The table was upended, its contents crashing to the ground. A man charged after the girl while she scrambled to her feet and steadied herself on the dessert table when she nearly tripped on her own feet.

“What’s going on?” Ann asked. “What’s she doing?”

The girl climbed over the table, knocking over a tray of cookies and squeezing between a chocolate fountain and a caramel fountain that each stood several feet high. The man chasing her – Akira recognized him as hotel security – reached over the table for her, but she slipped from his grip as she landed on the ground on the opposite end of the table. She shoved the chocolate fountain and it went tumbling onto him, spraying a sticky geyser all over the floor and the man.

“This girl’s insane!” Morgana said.

“You’re tellin’ me,” said Ryuji.

While the security guard was wiping the chocolate from his eyes and scandalized rich people gawked at the scene, the girl grabbed an entire stack of souffle pancakes from the dessert table that she had just desecrated and dunked them in the white chocolate fountain. The man lunged for her, and in her haste to avoid him she dropped half of her bounty into the fountain.

Seeing the loss of several pancakes to the fountain, she yanked the tablecloth out from under the dessert table. The surviving white chocolate and caramel fountains went crashing to the ground, spraying over the floor, food, and even some people. Without missing a beat, the girl went straight to sweeping the contents of the fish platter into the pilfered tablecloth and tying it like a bundle. The guard, now seeing that the table was already in ruins, shoved it out of the way so that he'd have a clear path to the girl. She stumbled backwards from the man, tripping over her own feet again. When she hit the ground, she skidded several feet back like she had greased the ground or something. Akira didn't have a clear view, so he assumed that there was a spillage of chocolate sauce there.

“She’s stealing food,” Ann said.

“She must be desperate,” Morgana said.

Akira understood how he could’ve come to that conclusion, but something still felt off about this to him. A starving person wouldn’t steal from a place with tight security, would they?

The security guard grabbed her by the collar of her shirt, but in response she reached up and grabbed her own shirt right next to where he held her, and the guard somehow lost his grip on her. Akira tried to imagine how she could coax the fabric into slipping out of his grasp. The girl ran from the man, towards a balcony that overlooked the city streets and slamming the door shut behind her. Akira’s logic told him that if she hadn't planned an escape route ahead of time, she'd be trapped between security and a several-story drop, but his instincts were telling him that this girl might know what she's doing. The security guard tried to push his way in, but the door stayed shut.

“She’s not gonna get away,” Morgana said. “They’ll corner her on the balcony.”

“This is way too much for me right now,” Ann said. “I really hope we look cooler than that in the Metaverse.”

“Well, she sure ain’t stealthy like us, that's for sure,” Ryuji said, grinning at the trail of destruction.

Morgana pawed his face. “Like _you_ could get this far in. You’d get caught at the doors. This girl’s good enough to make it this far in, even if her escape is lacking.”

“We should talk to her,” Akira said, glancing out the door “I don’t get the impression that she’s a bad person.”

“What makes you say that?” Ann asked.

He could’ve said, ‘because I checked with my supernatural vision powers and saw that I could form a bond with her by the giant card floating over her head’, but that would require more explanation than he had time for. Instead, as he got up from his chair and sauntered towards the balcony, he said, “Phantom Thief’s intuition.”

* * *

Lift’s heart was racing as she shoved an outdoor chair into the balcony door, wedging it against the railing. She grabbed one of the strange pieces of meat from her pilfered food-supply and chowed down on it, savoring the taste. It had that taste that rich people foods tended to have. The taste of a successful heist.

“Mistress,” Wyndle said, “we should really be going.”

“Too high; can't jump,” Lift said, stilling chewing. She swallowed roughly before continuing. “Can’t climb down with all this food, either.”

“Then drop the food!” Wyndle said.

There was a banging on the door, but it jammed against the chair shoved between it and the balcony railing. Lift leaned up against the door and gave the security guard a lazy salute through the window.

“That’s a perfectly good chair,” Wyndle said. “I would’ve loved having a chair like this once upon a time, and you’re using it as a barricade. You could damage it.”

There was a knock on the window. While the building’s security tried to force the door open, a young man with messy hair and spectacles tapped at the glass with his knuckles. She notice he was very pale, but he didn't have those eyes like people did in Shin country. At his side was a small tote bag with a hairy, black and white animal in it.

“What do you think he wants?” Lift said.

“He probably wants to catch you,” Wyndle said. “Like everyone else in the building.”

“Nah, he’s got a furry thing trapped in his bag,” Lift said, sauntering up to the window. “He couldn’t fit me in that bag with the animal already in there, so I think I’m safe.”

Wyndle muttered under his breath. “Mother, please help me.”

“Hey there,” the boy said, his voice muffled through the glass.

“Hiya,” Lift said. “What do you want?”

“I was just wondering how you plan to get out of this. Looks like you’re in a tough spot.”

The banging on the door kept on going. The security guard was so busy with trying to get to her that he didn’t even notice the guy she was talking to that was standing less than five feet away. There was nothing but rage and death reflected in the man's eyes, which Lift thought was absolutely hilarious for somebody coated in dessert sauces. “I was just gonna wing it,” she said, pulling her eyes away from the sight.

The boy nodded along. “Do you need any help?” he asked. She got the impression of the sorta person who knew what it meant to make get in trouble and improvise a way out.

“Yeah, if you could catch the food and get it away from here, I could sneak out real easy.”

“And where would I meet you after doing that?” the boy asked.

“If you don’t let the people who own this place have the food back, I’ll let you keep it,” she said. “As long as they don’t have it anymore, they lost. That's just about the same as me winning, so I'll take it.”

“So she’s just giving us all the fish and calling it a victory?” the hairball in his bag said to the boy. She’d never seen one of those things before, but she had just assumed it was a regular animal.

“Yep,” she said. “It's about the principle.”

“That’s really – hey, wait a minute,” the animal said. “Did you just hear me talk?”

“There’s a window in the way, but I’m listenin’. Am I not supposed to do that?”

The boy looked at her, shocked. The animal looked shocked too, if she was right in thinking that was what its sort of creature looks like when they’re surprised. She guessed that made sense. Animals from where she was from weren’t supposed to be talking, so that probably applied here too. It probably wouldn’t be easy to invent pancakes with talking animals running about, after all. They'd just whine about not getting fed all the time, but use words to do it.

“Mistress, you’re talking to an animal,” Wyndle said. “I’ve seen you navigate conversations I couldn’t begin to follow, but you’re _talking to an animal_. In a _language I’ve never heard before_.”

“It’s just words,” Lift said, breezing past Wyndle’s nonsense about her doing something ‘completely unheard of’ or ‘being stuck in the cognitive realm’ again. It got real boring when he did that. She could do all that stuff ‘cause she’s awesome, and that was that.

Wyndle sighed. “You’re too calm about this.”

“Are you talking to someone else?” the boy asked. “How can you hear Morgana? What are you doing stealing food?”

Just on cue, the security guard banged the door just right for the chair she wedged between it and the railing to clatter to the floor. Lift grabbed the pancakes covered in the white dessert sauce from her bag, tossing the rest of it over the balcony. The man took the opportunity to grab her by the wrist.

“Meet you ‘round these parts tomorrow,” she said to the boy, awesomely freeing herself from the grasp of the guard. “Gotta run!”

She vaulted over the balcony, grabbing the ledge before she fell all the way down. Wyndle wrapped one of his vines around her wrist, and she used the greenery sprouting from him as a tether as she climbed down from the side of the building, pancakes clutched tight to her chest. At the bottom, she saw another security guard running towards her, from the lobby.

Knowing she didn’t have time to take the rest of her loot, she turned and ran with her stack of a half-dozen pancakes clutched tight to her chest.

* * *

Akira pulled away from the window. The people from the buffet – wealthy elites with social-climbers and yes-men intermingling among them – gawked at the spectacle and the trail of destruction the thief had left in her wake. Ryuji was clearly trying to hold back laughter, while Ann seemed to be mourning the dessert platter that she had fallen so deeply in love with.

“Dude, that girl’s crazy!” Ryuji said, catching up with Akira. “You think we oughta change her heart?”

“I have my doubts that that'll be possible,” Morgana mumbled.

“If we’re lucky, we’ll get to meet her again and figure all that out,” Akira said. “For now, let’s get out of here. People might start asking what I talked to her about.”

* * *

**PANCAKES ACQUIRED: 6**


End file.
